The title of Taking Back Sunday’s new release has the would-be listener expecting a renaissance. This expectation isn’t too far off from reality. If you had told me while I was slitting my wrists to Tell All Your Friends that the same band would come out with something so – energetic? – I would have shaken my eyeliner at you in disbelief. Not only because Taking Back Sunday is known for their outwardly depressing songs, but also because I would have doubted that a band so firmly entrenched in the emo tradition would be able to pull itself out of the early 2000s and modernize for the new alt-rock scene.

The album’s immediate standouts are its first two tracks. The debut, “New Again,” had me extremely bewildered by its opening riff that smacks of Young Love mixed with the Arctic Monkeys, but after the first ten seconds it was back to sounding like the band that wrote it. The entire song is a musician’s declaration of intent – “I’m ready to be new again” – for which the album was obviously named. “Sink Into Me,” the album’s first single, is the first one I fell in love with on the album because it’s the most catchy while still maintaining the band’s original, darkly edgy sound. “Lonely, Lonely,”

“Summer, Man” and “Cut Me Up Jenny” all have follow-up single potential, while “Swing,” with its violent guitar and bass lines, is the most serious contender for this band’s Guitar Hero or Rock Band debut. “Carpathia” brings more artistic innovation to the album than any other track, especially with the style of its verses that sound oddly like Rage Against The Machine (it’s good, I promise). Meanwhile, “Everything Must Go” is a fitting last track for the album – ambient, slightly discordant and extremely powerful.

Conclusion: This album is solid. The sounds of its riffs are hardly original, but it’s the perfect soundtrack to a hot summer day in 2009, both for lovers of mainstream rock and those who swear by hardcore. Only on “Where My Mouth Is” does Taking Back Sunday come dangerously close to dying a sappy top 40, pseudo-”Hey There Delilah”-induced death, but we can just ignore that. It’s summer, and nobody’s looking for perfection, just a good album to headbang and dance around to. I’d say that New Again definitely fits that mold.